FifteenEightyFour | Cambridge University Press » UK Historyhttp://www.cambridgeblog.org
The Official Blog of Cambridge University PressFri, 24 May 2019 10:41:53 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3.1Empire of Hellhttp://www.cambridgeblog.org/2019/03/empire-of-hell/
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2019/03/empire-of-hell/#commentsTue, 26 Mar 2019 20:46:52 +0000http://www.cambridgeblog.org/?p=29131The rise and fall of convict transportation in the British Empire is often told as a Gothic melodrama. John Mitchel, the Young Ireland leader transported for treason, was typical in referring to the British transportation system as an ‘Empire of Hell’. He was even more scathing about attempts to reform the convicts in Van Diemen’s Land: ‘What a blessing to these creatures, and to mankind, both in the northern hemisphere and in the southern,’ he claimed, ‘if they had been hanged’.

But were the convicts quite so fiendish – and was the system of convict transportation quite so hellish – as Mitchel claimed? Convict historians have been challenging older stereotypes for a generation or more, but they have had relatively little to say about religion. Empire of Hellsets out to illuminate the variety of reformist, religious and idealistic elements that were part of the British convict system from the late eighteenth century until the last convicts were removed from Gibraltar in 1875. Religiously-based reform lay at the heart of the convict transportation enterprise.

I have been reflecting on religious aspects of convict voyaging for a long time. Like many Australians, my engagement with convict sites began in childhood with expeditions to Port Arthur in the former penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. I spent my honeymoon on Norfolk Island, admiring the convict graves with their poignant headstones and absorbing its disturbing history of violence. In my research, I was moved by the fiery anti-transportation rhetoric of Father John McEncroe who was a friend to many friendless men executed by the state. I was touched by the assiduous humanity of the Quaker visitors, George Washington Walker and James Backhouse, or Mrs Elizabeth Fry’s relentless agitation on behalf of women prisoners. Convict sites, many of them world-heritage listed tourist attractions, are full of ghosts – both those who came in chains and the reformers who agitated to bring the system to an end.

Empire of Hellmakes no attempt to celebrate middle-class religious reformers at the expense of prisoners and their suffering. Despite all attempts at reform, transportation was always humiliating and rarely reformative, even if it was not quite the living death of those condemned to slavery.

What is critical to my reading of transportation is that I argue that religion was used to both justify and then to tear down the convict system. Evangelical Anglicanism was the creed of most of those who supported the first convict colonies in Australia, moderated by the enthusiasm of pietistic Methodists with their heart religion and belief in the possibility of forgiveness for all. The Evangelicals have not been received warmly by historians, but their influence was critical to the shift away from physical tortures for the condemned and toward reformation. Their most significant recruit was the remarkable Sir George Arthur, whose penal system in Van Diemen’s Land was founded on Evangelical principles from first to last. While the anti-transportation movement was led by a Nonconformist, John West, Roman Catholics were as active in condemning the ‘terror of transportation’. All creeds united to bring about its end.

]]>http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2019/03/empire-of-hell/feed/0A Divided Kingdom? A View of 20th Century Britainhttp://www.cambridgeblog.org/2019/02/divided-kingdom-an-interactive-view-of-20th-century-britain/
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2019/02/divided-kingdom-an-interactive-view-of-20th-century-britain/#commentsMon, 11 Feb 2019 13:39:14 +0000http://www.cambridgeblog.org/?p=28536Are we really a United Kingdom? In a year that has seen the British public trying to grasp the politics at play with the dreaded B-word, we look back at some key moments in British politics and social surveys since 1900. Pat Thane’s remarkable analysis of data across the 20th Century United Kingdom outlines with clarity the inequalities faced by UK society over the last 100 years, examining race, class, gender, sexuality and more, and attempts to resolve them, in a comprehensive survey.

In a recent round-table discussion hosted by the European University Institute, Professor Sally Alexander of Goldsmith’s University commented that Professor Thane’s book inadvertently poses these important questions to the current government:

What can you do, and can you learn from this?

You can watch the full discussion from the European University Institute, organised by Laura Lee Downs, here.

Divided Kingdom (September 2018) is available for both purchasing and inspection copy requests. Find out more by visiting www.cambridge.org/Thane.

]]>http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2019/02/divided-kingdom-an-interactive-view-of-20th-century-britain/feed/0The British Army and the First World Warhttp://www.cambridgeblog.org/2018/10/the-british-army-and-the-first-world-war/
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2018/10/the-british-army-and-the-first-world-war/#commentsWed, 17 Oct 2018 08:00:49 +0000http://www.cambridgeblog.org/?p=27934Innovation is big business. Whether we’re talking about blue chip companies like Apple, multinationals like Google, or the Defence community, the ability to innovate is associated with greater competitive advantage and versatility. Yet, for the military, in an era marked by tightening budgets, constant confrontation, and the blurred distinction between war and peace, armed forces have embraced innovation as the means through which military advantage can be maintained and enhanced. As one senior British officer remarked, ‘Innovation … is the way we respond to the new threat environment. We need to be more creative, take more risk, and focus on output’. Yet, innovation isn’t just a twenty-first century concern. Whether we’re studying Antioch, Antietam, or Alamein, the need to think creatively, to exploit new opportunities, and to innovate quicker than an adversary are enduring and timeless requirements.

One hundred years ago, the British Army was thinking creatively, exploiting new opportunities, and attempting to win the innovation game against its adversaries in the First World War. On the battlefields of the Western Front, Italy, Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), Palestine, and Salonika, the army was using and developing cutting edge technology. It was combining different arms: artillery, infantry, aeroplanes, and tanks all working in concert. It was drawing on the world of ‘big business’, employing managers of large companies to help improve its efficiency.

We don’t tend to hear much about this story of the British Army’s experience of the First World War, and that’s because it butts up against popular narratives associated with the conflict. It doesn’t support the overarching perception of glaring incompetence: of over-promoted generals with little appetite for change, of the seemingly predictable nature of the same tactics used over again, resulting in the mass casualties of the Somme and Passchendaele. I wrote Learning to Fight because I felt that those narratives oversimplified the challenges that the army faced during the First World War. They overlook the difficulties of fighting in multiple theatres; of transforming citizens into soldiers; of trying to defeat a variety of tenacious adversaries in a lethally competitive environment. Learning to Fight is not an attempt to whitewash the army’s performance in the war. Instead, it charts a messy process of learning and change, which was marked by risk, pragmatism, failure, as well as success.

Throughout the centenary of the war, the British armed forces of today have looked back at the experience of their forbearers. Military practitioners are reaching back to the First World War as a possible source of lessons for the future: how to rapidly mobilise and deploy the army, how to grow or ‘regenerate’ the force, and how to make the most of civilian expertise as a way of bringing in fresh ideas and talent. “I am struck by just how much innovation there was a hundred years ago,” remarked the former British Chief of the Defence Staff, “[i]t was very much about innovation on the battlefield and achieved a remarkable effect”.

]]>http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2018/10/the-british-army-and-the-first-world-war/feed/0Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britainhttp://www.cambridgeblog.org/2018/10/yes-to-europe-the-1975-referendum-and-seventies-britain/
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2018/10/yes-to-europe-the-1975-referendum-and-seventies-britain/#commentsWed, 10 Oct 2018 16:24:23 +0000http://www.cambridgeblog.org/?p=27906Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain by Robert Saunders is available now. This episode is also available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and Spotify.

]]>http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2018/10/yes-to-europe-the-1975-referendum-and-seventies-britain/feed/0Notes of a Bookseller: A Century of the Women’s Votehttp://www.cambridgeblog.org/2018/02/a-century-of-the-womens-vote/
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2018/02/a-century-of-the-womens-vote/#commentsFri, 02 Feb 2018 15:38:25 +0000http://www.cambridgeblog.org/?p=27005About the Cambridge University Press Bookshop

Cambridge University Press Bookshop opened in 1992, but the shop itself has been around for a great deal longer and selling books all the while; since 1581, in fact. Passing from hand to hand over the centuries, 1 Trinity Street was taken over in 1846 by Daniel and Alexander Macmillan who employed their nephew, Robert Bowes, as an apprentice. He would later become partner and eventually take on the premises. The shop remained Bowes & Bowes until 1986 when it became Sherratt & Hughes before Cambridge University Press took it on in 1992. We are still going strong today, showcasing around 50,000 different titles in the shop. In 2008, we expanded round the corner into 27 Market Hill where we opened our specialist Education and English Language Teaching shop the following year. We are proud to continue the fine old tradition of selling books here and contributing our bit to the fine history of 1 Trinity Street.

100 Years of Votes for Women

This February we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of women in Britain being granted the right to vote. The Representation of the People Act, which became law on Feb. 6th, 1918, gave the vote to women over 30 who were occupiers of property or married to occupiers. Admittedly this was limited: although I would be enfranchised, some of my colleagues here at the shop would not. It would take another ten years for full women’s suffrage. That being said, it was a huge success for the women’s suffrage movement, which as we will see from some of my chosen Library Collection books this month, had been growing from strength to strength in the years leading up to World War I.

First up is The Woman Question in Europe (1884), a collection of essays from women across Europe who were involved in the positive progress of the ‘woman question’. It’s a well-intentioned and fascinating bit of comparative social history. In her chapter on electoral rights in Britain, Millicent Garrett Fawcett outlines the contemporary state of women’s suffrage in England. The name of Fawcett may be familiar to you: this pioneering feminist has recently been in the news, being favoured to be the first woman to have her statue in Parliament Square – ahead of Baroness Thatcher (and indeed Emmeline Pankhurst who is in nearby Victoria Tower Gardens). She was also one of the founders of Newnham College here in Cambridge. As well as contributing to this comparative study, she’s the author of another of our texts, Personal Reminiscences, which looks back on the suffrage movement and its achievements from 1920 (more of which below).

Fawcett reminds us that women were asking for enfranchisement only in those cases where they met the same conditions as those men who had the vote, i.e. held property. The 1880s marked a phase in the suffrage movement where mass demonstrations and peaceful rallies were becoming commonplace; suffrage, previously the concern of the educated and higher class women, was now moving from an intellectual pursuit into the “rank and file of women themselves” (p. 15); from drawing room to town hall and beyond. It is a reminder, however, of the fact that it was still necessary for the women’s case to be argued by men in parliament. There were some strong voices in their favour (notably JS Mill), but at this stage the prevailing sense was frustration. Remembering this helps to explain the militancy of some twentieth century suffragettes.

Next is Margaret Mary Dilke’s Women’s Suffrage, first published in 1885. From 1878 Dilke was an active member of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, and later treasurer of the Central National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Written at the same time, but in a very different tone from Fawcett, Dilke’s is a rapier-sharp book in which she challenges and takes-down the major anti-suffrage arguments and nonsense that were spouted in certain quarters of the contemporary political scene: “women have suffered at least as much from the ignorance of men as to their real wants and wishes, as they have from any deliberate intention of legislating against them” (pp.26-7).

If we come to think of it, the amount of civility and attention now paid by men to women in society is not so very extensive. If men wait on women in public, do not women always wait on men in private? And they will certainly continue to cook the dinners, and warm the slippers, and lay the newspaper, all cut and folded, at the man’s elbow, even should they afterwards find time to read that newspaper themselves. (Women’s Suffrage, p. 31)

In an excellent precursor to the famous 1912 poster What a Woman may be, and yet not have the Vote, Dilke writes: “It has often been remarked that the law classes women with infants, criminals, and lunatics; but even in that doubtful company she holds an inferior position. A minor grows to manhood before many years are passed, a criminal resumes the rights of citizenship as soon as his sentence has elapsed, a lunatic may recover and vote as before; but a woman, do what she will, is always excluded. A fortune may be left her; she may attain celebrity in literature, art, or science; she may be upheld as a model of all the virtues; she may devote herself to her country, and pour out her wealth for its benefit—but a vote she has never any hope of reaching.” (Women’s Suffrage, p. 50)

This is a far more scathing indictment of the anti-suffrage movement than the previous work, but it is supposed to be. Dilke was politically astute and angry; the book is fast-paced and a pretty exciting read. She would be great on Twitter, describing “politicians whose brains are not distinguished for lucidity” (p.56) and stating “the rights of parents over their children are certainly very simple, if not very just. One parent, the father, has all the rights. The other, the mother, has none” (p.67). Indeed, the chapter “Women’s Grievances” should be required reading for all people today who don’t use their vote. It’s brilliant and furious stuff, yet full of clarity and succinctness of message.

My final pre-war text is British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (1894, 3rd edition 1907), by Shakespeare scholar and feminist, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes. This is a concise history of British women’s legal and civic rights and how they have varied over the centuries. It was a pioneering work which became a key text used by women’s suffrage activists to justify their position. “The privilege of British Freewomen remained a recognised quantity for ages, though that quantity became ‘small by degrees and beautifully less,’ it was not finally annihilated till the heart of the nineteenth century.” (p.24)

As our other writers have done, Stopes takes particular interest in the combination of property and sex as reasons for exclusion from the voting franchise: “What is simply unjust when individuals are selected on the basis of sex, becomes both illogical and unjust when questions of sex are imposed on those of property” (p.28). She recounts the facile arguments made against women’s suffrage on the basis of their lack of strength or understanding; their inability to understand maths or the classics; their not-heavy-enough brains; the fact that they are not Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Raphael. Still, Stopes writes, at least it’s not as bad today as it was one hundred years earlier, when:

“An eldest son that received all the inheritance and privilege had therewith to support the women of his father’s family as well as of his own. It was disgraceful for him as well as for them that they should earn no money. But they gave him labour, acting as upper servants, butts of ridicule, as the case might be, or blind worshippers when all the outer world had learned to disbelieve in him.” (p. 208)

I am reminded of the term “spinster cluster” here, used to describe the leftover genteel women cut out of inheritances and with no way of earning money who banded together in groups of relatives and close friends in similar positions to pool their resources. It’s an arrangement seen time and again in the novels of, for example, Jane Austen. It is higher education which Stopes believes brought women to the point where they are now independent enough of men to earn their own livings, albeit for less pay, although they are still oppressed “by man’s power of place, which gives him power of veto; by inherited thought-fallacies and linguistic inaccuracies; by the nature of the medium through which things are seen.” (p.204).

It is generally accepted that it was World War One that finally brought the political and social state of Britain into the right climate to accept women’s suffrage as expedient and necessary. The last couple of books were written after the war, after the 1918 Act, and when enfranchisement was moving towards its next hurdle: full adult suffrage (achieved in 1928).

By 1917 the Government and country were “face to face with the impossible position that if circumstances necessitated an appeal to the country there was in existence no register of voters which could in any sense be looked upon as representative of the manhood of the nation,” all that was left being “the elderly, the infirm, the shirker, the crank who had remained at home evading military service, and ‘the conscientious objector.’ (The Women’s Victory, p. 122)

We return first to Millicent Garrett Fawcett whose book, The Women’s Victory – and After, Personal Reminiscences, 1911–1918, outlines how the tide finally turned towards the women’s vote in 1918.

Highly critical of parliament which, in 1912, seemed “scarcely capable of giving intelligent attention to any subject unless it is forced to undertake the excruciating pain of thought by the demands made by voters in the constituencies” (p.40), Fawcett is nevertheless a moderate and non-militant.

By 1917 it was the time for the women to come forward again, having played it quiet for a few years, using their various organisations to support the war effort and replenish the domestic workforce. But a new obstacle arose, namely that if they were granted the vote on the same footing as the men, which they had always demanded, then they would far outnumber the male electorate. This is where the 30 years or over rule came in. Hugely objectionable to suffragists, it was never the less accepted as necessary: “The thirty years age limit for women was quite indefensible logically; but it was practically convenient in getting rid of a bogie whose unreality a few years’ experience would probably prove by demonstration. We remembered Disraeli’s dictum, ‘England is not governed by logic, but by Parliament.’” (The Women’s Victory, pp.142-3)

Circumstances and decades of work had arrived at this point in 1918 with the limited extension of the franchise and women “no longer treated either socially or legally as if they were helpless children” (pp.153-4). As Fawcett goes on to outline, though, the struggle was not over, with the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship in 1919 listing the following aims:

We demand equal pay for equal work. And we demand an open field for women in industrial and professional work.

We demand the immediate reform of the divorce law and the laws dealing with solicitation and prostitution. An equal moral standard must be established.

The Government is in favour of widows’ pensions in principle. By constant pressure we mean to make the House of Commons turn principle into practice. We demand pensions for civilian widows.

Women must speak for themselves as well as vote. We want to extend the women’s franchise, and we are determined that women candidates holding our equality programme shall be returned to Parliament at the next election.

At present women are not legally recognized as the guardians of their children. We are working to secure equal rights of guardianship for both parents.

Lastly, we are demanding the opening of the legal professions to women. We wish to enable women to become solicitors, barristers, and magistrates.” (Personal Reminiscences, pp. 161-2)

I leave you to assess for yourself how effectively those demands have been met a century later.

Last but by no means least, let’s have a look at the Letters of Constance Lytton, first published in 1925 and edited by her sister, Betty Balfour. Lady Constance was a suffragette of the more infamous kind: brave and influential she not only used her position to influence politics at a high level, but also took to the streets, disguising herself as a working-class woman and undergoing hunger strikes and force feeding in order to experience and expose the physical struggle on the street-level of the suffrage movement. These diaries, although incomplete, give a striking and moving first-hand account of the movement through all levels of society and the disparity of the treatment of the women from different classes.

Con (as she is referred to in this book) became gradually involved in militant suffrage movement, having begun in October 1908 by visiting its members, including Emmeline Pankhurst, in prison and offering her support. As the movement spread and having witnessed the social inequalities in the way that women in prison were both treated and sentenced, she had become militant herself, writing in April 1909: “How can modern educated women agitate? The thing is unthinkable. But oppose them with a touch of uncivilised barbarity; to even a small extent make martyrs of them;—and the thing is made easy for them at once.”

She continued to work tirelessly for the movement until she suffered a stroke in 1912. She had recovered enough to begin her book Prisons and Prisoners in 1913. She completed this in 1914 before the outbreak of the War and the change of tactics that brought an end to the militant suffrage protests. Con remained active in her efforts to help various causes through the war and afterwards, although she was physically unable to do much. She died in 1923.

These books give the reader a real sense of how exhausting and demoralizing it must have been for these women and supportive men arguing their corner for suffrage against such deeply-engendered misogynies and illogical fallacies. As we enter the next 100 years, let’s look forward to building on these hard-won rights for women across the world.

You can learn more and follow the Cambridge University Press Bookshop here:

]]>http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2018/02/a-century-of-the-womens-vote/feed/0Commemorating catastrophehttp://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/11/commemorating-catastrophe-the-great-war-100-years-on/
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/11/commemorating-catastrophe-the-great-war-100-years-on/#commentsFri, 10 Nov 2017 21:20:13 +0000http://www.cambridgeblog.org/?p=26715One hundred years after the United States’ entry into the 1914–18 world war, what aspects of this vast global conflict, and of America’s role in it, are worthy of commemoration?

First and foremost, we remember the ten million men all over the world who lost their lives in the war. Indeed, remembering this “Lost Generation” is big business today. Millions are being spent on memorial sites and ceremonies around the globe. Millions of people pay considerable sums to get to them. And yet the ubiquity of commemorative gestures hides a predicament: is it possible to honor the men who died in war without glorifying war itself?

I believe that it is possible—indeed it is essential. One way is to recognize the yawning gap between the ordinary decencies of the men who went to war and the blindness of the men who led them into a kind of battle the world had never seen before, a kind of battle they could not control. Their errors, their blindness, their arrogance—in some cases, their criminal incompetence—sentenced millions to hardship, mutilation, and death. Remember that half of the ten million have no known graves; their bodies were blown to pieces by the greatest collection of artillery the world had ever seen.

Fifty years after I first started to study the Great War, I still feel a kind of cognitive dissonance when I speak of it: how can we understand so much suffering for so little reason? The poignancy of much war remembrance derives from this simple reflection, that the men who ran the war unleashed something that was beyond their comprehension and that they were unable to control. The Great War moves us for this reason alone.

The central questions today are what, when, and where to commemorate. I look at these questions in terms of what I would like to call the degeneration of war. Between 1914 and 1918, the rules under which armed conflict is conducted were transformed in such a way as to expand the number of its victims exponentially without shortening its duration by a single day. This double outcome is what I mean by degeneration. One key element in this process was the obliteration of the distinction between military and civilian targets. That nineteenth-century norm did not survive the German invasion of Belgium and northern France in 1914. Atrocities were by no means a German invention; they were simply built into German war plans. The German army could not traverse the most densely packed population in Europe and meet its strict timetable of advance without killing and maiming civilians and responding to perceived (though unreal) resistance with an iron fist—a policy they termed Schrecklichkeit, ruthless terror. For decades German observers presented these charges as pure propaganda; we now know that they were true.

Both on the Eastern front and on the Western front, 1914 gave birth to one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century and after: the refugee—man or woman, elder or child, traversing Europe to get out of the way of the armies. This in itself was not new, though the magnitude of the refugee flow was unprecedented; what mattered was that many of these people became the targets of both sides. In the case of the Russian retreat of 1915, refugees became the targets of their own armies. Falling back after a major defeat, the czar’s soldiers killed between 50,000 and 100,000 Galician and Russian Jews. The victims termed this catastrophe the Drittr Hurban, or the Third Disaster, giving it the magnitude of the destruction (twice) of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. John Reed, later the chronicler of the Russian revolution, brought this story home to readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

A new kind of continent was born in 1915, felicitously termed “Refugeedom” by historian Peter Gatrell, a place where there are no laws and survival depends on a whim or on the generosity of more fortunate people. Gatrell shows the profound destabilization of the Russian empire through massive population displacement from the very first months of the conflict. These refugees scattered everywhere. And there were many others. In the very first year of the war, one million Belgians—out of a population of eight million—left their country. In 1915, similar numbers fled the invasion of Serbia by the Central Powers. In 1917, it was Italians who fled en masse after the German and Austrian breakthrough at Caporetto. Refugeedom, created in 1915, grew rapidly in later years. It is with us still.

If refugees were men and women largely without protection, what protection was there for those living as despised minorities in multiethnic empires that were engaged in a fight for survival? After 1914, every country tried subversion of their imperial enemies through appeals to disgruntled minorities: to the Irish in the United Kingdom, to the Czechs in Austria-Hungary, and most notably, to the Armenians in the Ottoman empire.

The quarrel between ethnic Armenians and Ottomans had been simmering for years; periodic eruptions of anti-Armenian violence had raised doubt in the minds of the triumvirate that ruled Turkey in 1915 as to the loyalty of the two million Armenians who had lived in the Ottoman empire for centuries. It is true that some Armenians fought in the Russian army in the Caucasus in 1914, where the Turkish army suffered a severe defeat. But the fear of what would later be termed a “fifth column” was a fantasy, and would become a genocidal fantasy in 1915.

April 24 and 25, 1915, form a turning point here. On those days two decisive events unfolded. The first was the Franco-British invasion of Gallipoli, in Turkey. After a failed naval campaign to force the straits of the Dardanelles, the Allies—at Winston Churchill’s instigation—decided on launching an amphibious operation to land on the western peninsula of Gallipoli, take the heights above it, and then proceed to Constantinople, several days’ march to the north. Nothing of the kind took place. The landing, on the night of the 24th and morning of the 25th, was botched—leaving the troops facing near-vertical cliffs they had to scale. They never managed it, and the operation turned into another version of the stagnant war of position on the western front at the time. The Turkish commander who blunted the invasion, Mustafa Kemal, became a national hero and legend: Ataturk, the father of his people. Meanwhile, those who suffered at the cutting edge of the defeat were not only British and French troops, but also Australian and New Zealand troops; by shedding their blood and performing with unquestioned courage, they constructed a national myth, one worthy of two independent nations. Thus the apogee of empire—drawing troops from the Antipodes to Turkey—was the beginning of the end of empire.

Australians and New Zealanders share April 25 as joint national holidays, moments of national affirmation. But Turks celebrate on March 18, the date of a battle that preceded the more costly and decisive victory at Gallipoli. For those who are attentive, April 25 cannot escape a darker kind of remembrance concerning Turkey. It was on that date that the Turkish triumvirate sent thousands of messages to their agents in Anatolia to proceed with a plan to uproot and deport two million Armenian villagers from their homes in central and eastern Anatolia. Thus was launched the Armenian genocide, at the very time the Allies landed in Gallipoli. Over one million Armenians, mostly women and children, died in the following months, many driven into the Mesopotamian desert with no chance of survival. German soldiers, allied with the Turks, saw what was happening; even though they reported back to their superiors, both civilian and military, no one acted to stop the killing. It was while reflecting on this crime two decades later that the Polish lawyer Rafael Lemkin invented the term “genocide.” April 25, 1915, is one of those dates requiring commemoration, partly to expose the absurdity of the fact that the current Turkish regime still claims that no such genocide took place. On each and every April 25, we need to break that silence.

In that same month, three days before, the German army in Belgium released 168 tons of chlorine gas over a front of about four miles. They created a gap in the Allied lines, though German forces were unable to exploit it. They also created a milestone in world history, one which Belgium commemorated in 2015, and which we need to commemorate in future. At Gravenstafel, the farming town where this attack occurred, chemical warfare was born. There had been some similar efforts before, but here was the first full and indisputable use of chemical weapons in combat.

What mattered most was the extent to which gas tortured much more than it killed, and the fact that it tortured soldiers who could not surrender. Battle, Clausewitz taught us, is an attempt to impose your will on the enemy, who then is forced to capitulate. But when gas weapons are used, the option of surrender is closed off. This revolutionizes battle. Battle becomes annihilation by asphyxiation, helped along by any existing wounds. By 1918 one in every four shells fired on the western front was a gas shell. As we can see in Syria today, the world has never been the same since.

How about 1916? On what, when, and where have commemorative events focused? The first is the town of Verdun, in eastern France. On February 21, 1916, the German army under Falkenhayn launched an assault on French fortifications—intended not to take them, but to draw the French army into a battle of attrition which would bleed it white. There is some controversy as to Falkenhayn’s real motives—did he want to take Verdun, but invented an alternative when he knew he could not achieve this goal? Perhaps. But more important than his logic was the logic of the battle itself. It was and remains the longest continuous, unbroken battle in history. It lasted ten months and achieved nothing, other than approximately 700,000 casualties. Nothing in the Second World War comes close to Verdun in its intensity and concentrated ferocity. Not even the second battle commemorated in 2016, the Battle of the Somme, which began on July 1 and lasted for five months. Mind you, the Somme topped Verdun in terms of casualties. Such estimates must be taken with a grain of salt, but whatever the final toll of life and limb on the Somme, it was well above one million men. That was certainly a moment to commemorate.

In 1917, the political character of the war changed. On April 2, President Woodrow Wilson asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war on the two Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. The declaration came four days later. For some prominent politicians—former president Theodore Roosevelt among them—that declaration was overdue. For others, it was a dangerous gambit with an uncertain outcome. For President Wilson it was a moral duty, to “make the world safe for democracy” and to put an end to future wars.

The greatest impact of this decision was not on the battlefield—though that was to come a year later, when mobilization delivered two million soldiers and the hardware they needed to the battlefields in France. What mattered most was that it significantly bolstered the Allied side of the war just at the moment of the first of two revolutions in Russia.

The two linked revolutionary moments in 1917 certainly deserve commemoration, though it is likely that the current regime in Russia will ignore them entirely. The second moment—the Bolshevik revolution of late October—completed the first, the overthrow of the czar on February 23, 1917. Propelled initially by a women’s strike in Petrograd on International Women’s Day, unrest grew to the point that the czar abdicated. The new provisional government made a fatal decision to continue the war. After a futile offensive on July 1, which turned into a rout two weeks later, support for the provisional government slowly evaporated. In late October, the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and proceeded to withdraw from the war. The date of October 25 in the old calendar, or November 7 in the new one, ought to be commemorated—not, as it was for 72 years, to mark the birth of communism, but to signal the moment when war bred revolution and counterrevolution at one and the same time.

The year 1918 provides several points on the calendar to mark, though not, I would argue, to celebrate. One is August 8, when the German army gave up any lingering beliefs in victory. The “black day of the German army,” in General Ludendorff’s words, resulted in the surrender of 100,000 German soldiers and in the final roll-up of the western front over the next hundred days. The second is October 23, when Woodrow Wilson demanded regime change as the price of German capitulation.

Seventeen days later, on November 9, the German revolution overthrew the Kaiser and launched the first democratic regime in German history. The Kaiser fled to Holland, handing over his ceremonial sword to a shocked Dutch postman. Surrender followed 48 hours later. Representatives of a new regime took responsibility for the defeat engineered by the old regime. The new German republic bore the humiliation of defeat, for which it would be blamed by the Nazis and others who concocted the stab-in-the-back legend. To be sure November 11, 1918, will be commemorated. But it was not the end of the war.

Let me offer a new date for the commemorative calendar of 1919. On May 4, the Chinese delegation at the Paris peace talks received the message that Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Woodrow Wilson had decided that China’s Shandong province, held by the Germans, would not be returned to China as the Allies had promised. Instead, it would go in the short term to Japan. This was a reward to Japan for the contribution of its naval power in the war; China, torn apart by civil war, had no such claims to make (though the provision of 150,000 Chinese laborers had given the Allies much-needed help in the logistical war). The decision also exposed the hypocrisy of the Allied commitment to self-determination. When Wellington Koo, one of the Chinese delegates in Paris, cabled home the news, he did not receive an answer for several days. The reason was that Chinese students, on hearing of the decision, burned down the telegraph office and much else in Beijing as well. They went on to form the May 4 movement, out of which the Chinese Communist Party emerged. What a day to mark: the day that Woodrow Wilson did his bit to create the Chinese Communist Party.

The year 1919 was a time when war changed color: its purpose became one of destroying or preserving the Reds. In Germany, Poland, and Lithuania, a mixed group—freebooters, old soldiers who liked the smell or the thrill of combat, young men who wanted their chance to fight, men of the radical right—continued to wage war, this time against the threat of communism, spreading westward from Russia to Germany. In a period when anti-Bolshevik violence spread from Berlin to Siberia, the hatred of international war was easily translated into the hatred of class war. Let us not forget that the Allies, including Japan and the United States, launched an invasion of Bolshevik Russia in 1919.

In effect, this was a war which did not end. Most people think November 11 is the day the guns stopped. Not so; they kept firing all over eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. They fired against massive crowds demanding a say in the peace in Cairo; they fired against demonstrators in Amritsar in India, killing over 1,000 people; they fired on March 1, 1919, against Koreans in Seoul demanding independence from Japan.

They fired too all over the Anatolian peninsula, where Mustafa Kemal Ataturk led a refashioned Turkish army to liberate its territory from occupying British and French forces, who left; and against Greek forces, who fled—together with over one million long-term Greek residents of the Ottoman empire. The great fire that destroyed the city of Smyrna (its Greek name) symbolized this catastrophe; that city is now Izmir. What was euphemistically called “population transfer” entailed the forced movement to the east of over one million Muslims previously resident in Europe and the expulsion of a similar mass of Christian Greeks westward toward “Christian” Europe. The date September 22, 1922, when the fire was put out, can serve as a commemorative moment: the day ethnic cleansing became an accepted principle of international relations. The term “degeneration of warfare” seems mild for the human catastrophe these legal terms concealed.

Perhaps the best way to mark these dates and to remember the Great War today is through meditation and pilgrimage—to local war memorials, to national ones, to war museums, and to war cemeteries and the battlefields in which they are enfolded. These are the sites of memory of the Lost Generation.

I believe that, in our secular age, these sites are the cathedrals of the twenty-first century. They are places where sacred questions are posed, and occasionally answered—eternal questions about sacrifice, death, love, loyalty, betrayal, devotion, suffering. In many parts of the world, more people go to museums than go to church. On a Sunday not long ago, I passed Trinity Anglican Church in Lambeth just after having visited the nearby Imperial War Museum in London, and was struck by the contrast.

While secularization has taken its toll on our churches, the sacred has not vanished from our field of vision. The sacred has simply moved out of the churches and inhabits other public spaces. Museums, cemeteries, battlefields, archives, monuments are among them. More in Europe than elsewhere, it is of the 1914–18 war that they speak. This separates Western Europe and the United States, and marks how war today is understood differently by our Allies.

Tourism is easy; pilgrimage is hard. Take the hard way, and reflect on the fate of millions of men who did not have the privilege of dying one at a time. Stand where they stood; read the inscriptions on their gravestones. Read the names, because in most cases, that is all that is left of them. Their name liveth for evermore, says Ecclesiasticus. That was the phrase chosen by Rudyard Kipling to mark every single British Imperial (now Commonwealth) war cemetery. Kipling knew of what he spoke: his son vanished during the Battle of Loos in 1915. His son’s name is all that remains.

Why do we need a grave specifically for an unknown soldier? The answer is simple. War has always been a killing machine. But artillery, amassed on a scale the world had never seen before, and stalemate on the western front meant that millions of men buried hastily near the front were literally made to disappear between 1914 and 1918. Again: five million men of the ten million killed in the war have no known graves. World War I was the first of the great “disappearances” of the twentieth century, the moment when the restraints, legal and practical, limiting the carnage brought about by war were themselves blown to pieces. Every Armistice Day, let us mark that event with the shock and horror it deserves.

]]>http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/11/commemorating-catastrophe-the-great-war-100-years-on/feed/0‘He rarely spoke of what he went through.’ Author Clare Makepeace reveals how her grandfather inspired her new book, ‘Captives of War’http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/10/he-rarely-spoke-of-what-he-went-through-author-clare-makepeace-reveals-how-her-grandfather-inspired-her-new-book-captives-of-war/
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/10/he-rarely-spoke-of-what-he-went-through-author-clare-makepeace-reveals-how-her-grandfather-inspired-her-new-book-captives-of-war/#commentsThu, 26 Oct 2017 09:00:00 +0000http://www.cambridgeblog.org/?p=26596The thing I love most about writing history is that it is unique. By that I mean each historian has their own interpretation of the past, which no one else can replicate. The history they write is a product of academic rigour as well as their own character. That second component doesn’t make history fictitious. It makes it relevant. Through being written by historians living in the present, history speaks to today’s concerns. Historians shine light on possible future paths we might take from here, by illuminating those we took in the past.

I was obsessed by the cultural history of warfare long before I realised why. My grandfather was captured in France on 12 June 1940. He spent almost five years as a prisoner of war (POW) in Poland. He rarely spoke of what he went through. The pain, my parents said, was too great. From an early age, I struggled to reconcile my kind, patient, unassuming grandfather going through things too dreadful to discuss. This is where my interest stems from. I am preoccupied with the ways in which the lives of individuals, through no fault of their own, were turned upside down by a global conflict, and how those people found meaning in that brutality and chaos.

It was something my grandfather said, back in 2008, that inspired me to write Captives of War. British Prisoners of War in Europe in the Second World War. Towards the end of his life he opened up a little more about his time as a POW, and I started to encourage him to write his memoir. One day he said ‘Why would I record my story? It would just be one long tale of humiliation.’ At that moment, I realised the way he saw his experience and how I saw it differed vastly. I admired my grandfather for what he had endured and survived. He, meanwhile, was ashamed. I wanted to understand his point of view: how it felt to be a POW and how these men made sense of the experience.

Captives of War is not about my grandfather. I wanted to get as close as possible to how POWs felt at the time of captivity, so I drew upon the diaries, letters and logbooks composed by POWs while they were behind barbed wire. My grandfather, alas, did not keep any. Instead, my book follows seventy-five other men, and delves into their inner and intimate worlds, following their journey from capture, through months and years of imprisonment, and their eventual liberation. I also look at POWs’ homecoming and return to civilian life.

By focusing upon the thoughts and emotions of these men, Captives of War opens up a whole other dimension of what it meant to be a prisoner of war, and a man in the Second World War. I reveal how, in their fantasies, POWs lived with their sweethearts, wives and parents back at home. I demonstrate how these men coped with their indefinite sentence by optimistically anticipating the war would end imminently. I expose the mental disturbances that tore through their minds.

And what of the future paths upon which Captives of War shines a light? Recently, with Brexit, Trump’s election and the AfD’s success in Germany, it seems to me that as those with a living memory of the Second World War pass away, we are readily forgetting the horrors they went through. I wrote Captives of War because I was acutely aware of the everyday, emotional cost that the Second World War inflicted on the lives that were entangled in it. I hope readers of my book will be encouraged not to take for granted global peace.

]]>http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/10/he-rarely-spoke-of-what-he-went-through-author-clare-makepeace-reveals-how-her-grandfather-inspired-her-new-book-captives-of-war/feed/0‘Never Mind the Bollocks: 40 Years On’ by Matt Worley / WIN! A copy of the new 40th Anniversary Deluxe Editionhttp://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/10/never-mind-the-bollocks-40-years-on-by-matt-worley-win-a-copy-of-the-new-40th-anniversary-deluxe-edition/
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2017/10/never-mind-the-bollocks-40-years-on-by-matt-worley-win-a-copy-of-the-new-40th-anniversary-deluxe-edition/#commentsFri, 20 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0000http://www.cambridgeblog.org/?p=26444In the moment, punk was arguably best served by the 7” single rather than the album. Like those 1960s ‘Nuggets’ to which Lenny Kaye lent the ‘punk’ label in 1972, the vibrancy, energy and snotty irreverence of kids bashing out a noise in the garage hits hardest when its short and sharp. Been and gone. Hit and run. Given punk emerged, in part, as a reaction to rock’s growing tendency to expand and display its virtuoso chops, sticking to a format that was supposedly more disposable and ephemeral made perfect, provocative sense.

This, initially, applied as much to the Sex Pistols as anyone else. While Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols is this month celebrated for reaching its 40th anniversary, it was the singles released prior to the album that really made the impact back in 1976–77. To be sure, the album’s title led to a court case over the meaning of the word ‘bollocks’, and the album’s newest song, ‘Bodies’, had enough expletives to excite The Sun. But the controversy around the album appeared mere froth compared to the seditious ramifications of the ‘God Save the Queen’ single released earlier in the summer to coincide with the Silver Jubilee. Likewise, the faux-outrage at swear words appeared somewhat after-the-fact, given that the initial moral panic that engulfed and effectively popularised punk was built on the Sex Pistols’ ‘foul mouthed’ appearance on Thames Television’s teatime Today programme in December 1976. Indeed, the album was even met by mumblings of discontent among some punk aficionados, what with its polished production and the inclusion of all four of the band’s 7”’s across its twelve songs. The ‘swindle’, it appeared, was about to begin.

Today, however, with musical formats, production and consumption so different to the 1970s, Never Mind the Bollocks remains an invaluable cultural artefact. Bar four songs and the odd cover version, it comprises the Sex Pistols set that helped tear a hole in the cultural fabric and continues to excite wistful nostalgia amongst those who were there. Its Jamie Reid designed sleeve still looks stunning; its yellow, pink and black colouring and ransom-note lettering iconic. And the sound, while somewhat claustrophobic compared to the demos and live recordings that continue to circulate, remains confrontational – from the goose-stepping intro to the up yours sign off at the end. Johnny Rotten’s words, in particular, retain a pertinence and a spite that allow us to remember just why punk resonated so widely and deeply. His lyrics to ‘Anarchy in the UK’, ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Holidays in the Sun’ remain vivid snapshots of the 1970s, what Jon Savage described as scrambled newscasts from a world beset by hostile forces: terrorism, the cold war and, most acutely, a prevailing mood of decay. The record bristles with exhilarating negation – no feelings, no future – and the pull of abjection. On ‘Bodies’ we are taken into the gurgling bloody mess of an abortion; ‘Problems’ dissects the narcissism of self-pity; ‘EMI’ mythologies the Pistols’ as it demystifies the machinations of the music industry. Lines jump out: ‘a cheap holiday in other people’s misery’; ‘there is no future in England’s dreaming’; ‘for people like me there is no order’; ‘I wanna destroy passer-by’; ‘I don’t believe illusions, too much is real’; ‘blind acceptance is a sign, of stupid fools who stand in line’. Throughout, there is a very real sense of how, for some at least, it felt to come of age in 1977, when something was happening, something was changing – but it was hard to know exactly what. All in all, Never Mind the Bollocks marks the Sex Pistols end, a record – both vinyl and historical – of their assault on culture.

WIN! Never Mind the Bollocks – 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

To celebrate 40 years since the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, we have TWO copies of the new 40th anniversary cd/dvd box set to give away. We’re giving away one copy on Twitter and one copy on Facebook.

The competition will close at 00.00 on 23 October 2017. Entrants must be 18+ only.